Resituating the Ethical Gaze: Government Morality and the Local Worlds of Impoverished Indigenous Women

This article was drawn in response to the governing policies that most negatively impact the lives of vulnerable populations, including Indigenous women and children, as they navigate through colonial systems while simultaneously experiencing the cumulative effects of historical and intergenerational trauma inflicted because of these systems. 

"This article reconsiders the complexities that shape the lived experiences of Indigenous women who simultaneously struggle with poverty, violence, trauma and addictions. The life narrative of Wanda, a First Nations woman, captures the intersecting factors that shape the lives of women who are essentially invisible and unwanted within Canadian society. Wanda’s life has been shaped by government policies: from residential school policies, that debilitated her parents; to CFS policies that permitted her to be moved from foster home to foster home while failing to safeguard against abuse; to policies that funded short- but not long-term residential treatment for her addiction. As Wanda’s life story reveals, governments intervened in her troubled life at times of ‘‘crisis’’ and in doing so very narrowly defined risk, the ethical management of it, and excluded other mitigating factors. The enormous personal toll for Wanda was lost in technocratic government responses (or non-responses) that were marked by institutionalized race, sex, and class discrimination, and by her own devalued self-worth and diminished moral right to societal support." (2).